Ashes, Ashes

7 - Drinking Games

Snow had started to fall by the time we got back to the cabin, small wet flakes that fell like dead weight from the sky. They melted into the earth on impact, but the ground was getting colder as the sun slipped away.  

Parker and Richard managed to get a fire going, and Abby and I started doing inventory on the alcohol reserves, pawing through the cooler from the back of Parker's SUV. The ice had melted down partway to slush, and we ended up propping the cooler on the cabin's porch to keep it cold while we huddled by the fireplace inside. Liza insisted we all put our phones in a basket, so nobody would look at them instead of talking -- We're here for each other, so live in the moment -- and we nested in chairs and pillows and blankets like a bunch of feral animals taking up residence in an abandoned house. 

We took it slow at first, awkward small talk and slowly nursing beers. We did the kind of catching up you do with people you know only from Facebook snippets, grasping at whatever relevant topics you can think of. 

Liza, how's acting going? 

Oh, you know, just some bit parts here and there. Community theater mostly. I got a role as an extra in this TV series about zombies...

Or else 

So Logan, you work at a hospital now right? What is it you're doing? 

Pharmacy technician. Yeah, I'm a drug dealer, ha ha, never heard that one before. 

Asking questions without caring about the answers, keeping it light, skirting around the hard things. I liked it that way, however much I usually despise small talk. Conversation kept me busy, so my thoughts couldn't turn sour, and none of it meant anything so I didn't have to feel anything. I heard about how Dawn was starting up some kind of business -- or maybe it was one of those pyramid schemes, some kind of Pampered Chef knockoff, I wasn't paying that much attention -- and how Abby had been dating some guy but he was an asshole (every guy was an asshole when Abby was tired of them, that had always been her way) -- and Richard had some car he was rebuilding that he was excited about. 

And Laurel. 

What would Laurel have been doing, if she were here? What would she have talked about? 

As much as I tried to keep from thinking about it, the topic kept sliding back to the forefront of my brain, and I could hear her voice 

(Logan I'm scared) 

so loud in my head it was like she was there with us, like she was standing behind me. 

"You know what we should do?" Richard said, suddenly. He stood in the doorway, smoking out the open door as cold air swirled around him, dragging the heat outside in a slipstream draft. "We should play a drinking game. Like old times. That's the idea, right?" 

Dawn wrinkled her nose in disapproval. 

"What sort of drinking game?" Liza asked, tilting her head. The firelight danced off the tight curls of her hair, which had been dyed a deep red. 

"One of the classics, if we're doing anything," Abby said. 

"Never have I ever," Richard suggested, and then, when everyone had groaned in disapproval, "Come on. It was Laurel's favorite." 

"Only because it gave her the chance to steal all of our life experiences and cannibalize them for stories," Parker said. 

He had a point. Laurel always had a tendency to steal things whole-cloth from other people's lives and weave them into her books. She got better at it later, by the time she was making a living at it, or maybe I just didn't know all the people who were showing up in her books by then. But you'd pick up one of her murder mysteries and realize, a few pages in, that the victim seemed suspiciously familiar, that some anecdote a character said was one of your childhood stories but twisted around a little.